A Jobless Man Sits on a Stone
A jobless man sits on a stone,
rough-hewn and silent,
he sees Mondays limping away,
he feels the lice multiplying in his armpits,
his pain slowly fills with blood;
he grieves, he sweats, he buttons up,
he counts his paystubs and finds his life lacking,
so many years of work and he wasn’t granted a single hour,
what is he waiting for now?
A jobless man sits on a stone,
he is sitting on the edge of his life,
with his sobs and his animal functions,
with his rage so short in inches,
his gaunt, collapsing words.
He sits and watches it all pass by:
the fixed capital,
the work process,
the export of surplus value,
and all his head-bowed sorrow;
he looks at his empty hands, bony and dilapidated,
lessening morsels within his palms,
lessening bones within his bread.
Look how he sits there all alone
among so many thousands like him,
look how hope rises and falls
in his throat, dry and atrophied,
his breath reeking of perseverance,
with all the “yes sures” and “yes sirs.”
It is he who gathered all the insults in his chest
instead of paying them back with all their splinters,
instead of breaking fear with hammer and chisel,
instead of defending his class with all his weight
he sawed and planed his violence,
what is left to him now?
Look how he suffers,
defeated and unorganized
all his life he tended to his own business,
all his life he kept hoarding;
his thoughts had no plural,
his actions had no plural,
always the first-person singular, always the passive voice,
he walked bowed among the bowed;
deep,
deep within his existence,
a silence, an affirmation, a curtailment . . .
A jobless man sits on a stone,
his thoughts stop at the stone;
he never thought to lift the stone,
he never thought to throw the stone.
from The Light that Burns Us
Jazra Khaleed
translated from the Greek by Viktoras Iliopoulos
Listen to a recording of "A Jobless Man Sits on a Stone" read in the original Greek by the poet:
Jazra Khaleed is an Athens-based poet, translator, and filmmaker. His works focus on issues of working-class experiences and cultures, homeland and origin, immigration and war, and are an indictment of racism, social injustice, and classism in contemporary Greece. He has published four collections of poetry, and his works haven been widely translated into European and Asian languages. English translations of his poems have appeared in The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of the Athenian poetry magazine Teflon and specializes in translating political and experimental poetry into Greek. His short films have been featured at international film festivals. The Light That Burns Us (World Poetry Books, 2021) is the first book of his poetry to appear in English translation.
Viktoras Iliopoulos is a literary translator specializing in Greek, Macedonian, Albanian, and Czech. His most recent translations of the Macedonian poet Andrej Al-Asadi will be published in the spring 2024 edition of World Literature Today. He has a master’s degree in Balkan studies from Charles University in Prague and is an instructor of Modern Greek and Albanian. “A Jobless Man Sits on a Stone” will be included in the expanded edition of Jazra Khaleed’s collection, The Light That Burns Us, which will be published by World Poetry Books in the fall of 2024.
